April 18, 2008

Alan Partridge once said, "You ought to have a basic grasp of Latin if you're working in Currys." whilst enquiring whether they stocked supplementary auxiliary speakers to go with his midi hifi system apropos achieving surround sound. Thank the gods of white goods merchants that I've managed to keep that particular employment Fosse Way open thanks to being one of the last state educated pupils to come out of a north east comprehensive schooled in Latin.

Latin that was taught to me by the cousin of Manimal himself...

Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii

No, seriously. Of the many meaningless and inconsequential ramblings I've hammered out on this keyboard in the name of the franchise gods, that fact happens to be totally and utterly true. Of course, he couldn't turn himself into anything other than a Latin teacher who looked a little like a cross between a startled hare and a very bad Morrissey impersonator who'd just stubbed his toe on an ornate urinal. Although he did posses the power to change the declension of words through the simple addition of m, s, t, mus, tis or nt.

Transmogrification posed no such problems for the Pyroviles. All they needed was to have people inhale specks of grit, leave to gestate and hey presto, instant race generation. A lot has been made about possible overarching themes of this series. In addition to planetary disappearance (first the Adipose home world then the heavens of Pyrovillia), more mentions of the Time War and Gallifrey and these ATMOS devices I've got the beginnings of a third theme. This is the second time we've heard about seeding - first the Matron was accused of illegally seeding a level 5 planet and now we have the Pyroviles seeding themselves into human bodies.

The key to the resurrection of Gallifrey, its labyrinthine and tedious committee structures and garden centre decor.

Could it be that the Doctor didn't actually destroy Gallifrey but - to hide the planet (and cover his tracks) - rewrote it into a series of innocuous elements, lets say billions of watercress seeds - which when brought back together, or "planted" in a certain way, spelt out the name "Titchmarsh" - a fabled god from the mid-afternoon times who holds the key to the resurrection of Gallifrey, its labyrinthine and tedious committee structures and garden centre decor. And it is this Tichmarsh (who actually turns out to be the warty thing on Donna's chin) who manages to restore all things to their rightful place in the heavens before hammering out another Bad Sex award winning opus. It could happen.

Placing that newspaper advert that brought together the Spice Girls.

The Doctor, by now, must be worried that he has played a part in every single catastrophe to befall the planet: making Vesuvius blow its top; the great fire of London; placing that newspaper advert that brought together the Spice Girls - he gone and done them all. The next time he lands in close proximity to a well documented historical event he should just stand there and start figuring out how he might end up being the cause of what's about to happen - the future equivalent of a drunk attempting to work out the next morning what had occurred the previous night by assessing the devastation around him. Because his footprints are all over our history like fingerprints in an episode of CSI.

Ghant charting abilities of the gods.

And exactly how many alien species have been on Earth for millennia? The planet formed around the Racnoss; the Silurians have been around for eons; Scaroth's ship exploded fusing amino acids to form life - to name but a few, and now the Pyroviles. The young Earth must have been heaving under the weight of all these creatures. Scheduling their attempts to take over Earth at various future points must have taken a project manager with kahunas of steel and Ghant charting abilities of the gods themselves. Still, the giant spider's plan would have given every one round the table a titter.

Of course the Doctor, in all his shouty historical indignation, completely failed to mention that he'd taken another girl to see Pompeii on volcano day. Somewhere, on the other side of town, was a moping seventh Doctor, an agitated Melanie Bush and an about to be TARDIS shaped indentation in the lava.

It has to have happened... I heard it happen... Although it wasn't in surround sound.

April 15, 2008

When I embarked on my Catherine Tate rant last week I had a sneaking suspicion that my words would come back to bite me on the arse eventually. What I didn't bank on was them rebounding on me quite so soon, or with such velocity. Bloody hell, she was great this week, wasn't she? The fact that her performance left me choking back my tears proves without doubt that I was not only wrong but very shortsighted as well. Tate displayed a humanity and warmth that genuinely moved me ad if she can engage me like this every week then I can easily forgive the odd comedy gurn. She was magnificent.

So I take it all back. Mea Culpa, as they say in Cardiff.

Tennant's still shit, though.

I'm kidding. David had his moments this week, I just wish he'd stop starting his sentences with a sharp intake of breath. It's driving me nuts. And what the hell was going on when the TARDIS went back for the Caecilius family at the end? Does the TARDIS have a Messianic Imagery Backdrop circuit in addition to a Hostile Action Displacement System? Or was Donna taking her mind off things by installing some sun beds in the console room? And who does the Doctor think he is, anyway? Kosh Naranek? David Copperfield? Matthew f***king Kelly?!

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, boyo

We're so used to gratuitous fanwank these days ("Macra!") that I felt slightly underwhelmed when the villains of the piece turned out to be generic rock monsters who just stomped about and croaked "Dok-tor!" a bit. It was nicely old-skool in flavour, but the invasion subplot never really gelled for me. Psychic whatsits? Energy converters powered by shower tiles? Eh? But the Pyroviles were never the real threat (especially when you can take them down with a water pistol). No, the real threat was always going to be history itself. Or at least that's what I was expecting.

I was looking forward to watching a morality play with the Doctor claiming to be powerless to intervene in the deaths of thousands of people and, to a certain extent, we got this. What I didn't expect was that the Doctor would be responsible for actively causing said deaths twenty minutes later! If you thought the Doctor starting the Great Fire of London was morally ambiguous, then detonating Vesuvius really takes the biscuit. Admittedly, it's not in the same league as accidentally contributing to the extinction of dinosaurs but I'm still not sure if I like my Doctor being so proactive in established history. Especially when fire is on the menu (cf. 100,000 BC, The Romans, The Visitation).

For starters, the ethical dilemma that should exist at the heart of the story is rendered completely meaningless. The Doctor either condemns Pompeii to its fate or the entire planet is invaded by third-division aliens and millions will die. It all comes down to the maths: Pompeii has to be sacrificed to save the world. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, boyo. Even Donna accepts this and pulls the trigger with him. What would have been far more interesting, to me at least, is if the Doctor let Pompeii fall for no greater cause than causality. The argument should have been "If anyone survives they could change established history" not "scary rock monsters will invade the planet!". Sure, it's a far more difficult and nebulous argument to engage in but the alien's presence in the story just gives the Doctor a heroic - and justifiable - reason for letting the disaster play out. I was hoping for a pure historical where the drama would have centered on Donna organising an evacuation while posing as a God, with the Doctor directly opposing her. Hey, it worked for Hartnell.

Does the TARDIS have a Messianic Imagery Backdrop circuit in addition to the
Hostile Action Displacement System?

At first, I was slightly annoyed by the rather twee epilogue (he's a God! we get it!) but in retrospect it does suggest that the Doctor's actions may have a (disastrous?) impact on established history as we know it. The Caecilus family certainly look like movers and shakers in Rome and if Quintus becomes a Doctor then who's to say that he won't save the lives of people who will consequently go on to corrupt earth's timeline. Even Mr Copper's warning at the end of Voyage of the Damned about monsters deciding who lives and who dies suggests that this conclusion isn't quite as pat as it first appears.

And after years of playing the spot-the-meme game we suddenly get a story arc worth discussing. What's happening to all these missing planets? What does "you have something on your back" mean? I can't help but conjure up images from Planet of the Spiders, and we all remember what happened there...

The Fires of Pompeii is a welcome return to form for Doctor Who. And it's about time. And while I've got issues with the direction the episode takes towards the end, there's no denying that it looks bloody fantastic. The guest stars give it their all (Capaldi and Davies could have carried the whole thing without resorting to yet another monster mash) and the decision to take the production to Italy pays dividends. It's a gorgeous, exciting, emotional and entertaining 45 minutes. Accipe Hoc!

April 12, 2008

"Hello, and on The South Bank Show tonight we'll be discussing the Doctor Who episode The Fires of Pompeii and consider its wider implications within the mythology of the series."

One of the first jokes I ever read/heard/not sure about the new series was via a trailer which was shown in the weeks leading up to the broadcast of Rose which was filled with special effects and explosions and which fans were terribly excited about until they realised it was for a docu-drama called Supervolcano about a supervolcano. I was hoodwinked for the first few seconds but then more impressed by the proper trailer because Billie Piper was in it and she was (still is) nice. At that point though I didn't ever expect that Doctor Who would even be able to afford an exploding mountain episode set in Roman times, despite what Verity and co were ambitious enough to attempt in the 60s.

But here we are four years later, that mountain has indeed exploded and Russell and co have produced yet another really, really exciting episode. Taking full advantage of their time on the set of the defunct HBO series Rome, this was an episode that unlike Daleks in Manhattan had depth of field and actually managed to feel as though it was recreating a historical point in time, of a society in peril. This was aided by some great performances from the likes of Peter Capaldi and the always underrated Phil Davis (if only North Square had been a hit) and fantastic special effects from The Mill, stretching once again what you'd think was possible in television drama,this was the most convincing blast we've yet seen on screen. About the only disappointment was that this didn't turn out to be the pure historical I'd hoped for, but those magma monsters were really rather good, about how you'd hope the similar shapes from Shada would have looked given a larger budget and a lack of labour disputes.

if only North Square had been a hit

Brilliantly, though, what might have got by on being a simple runaround with a bit black humour and old school threat in relation to whether the regulars will be able to find the TARDIS and disappear back into the vortex before hell rained on Pompeii, was given a far greater philosophical depth by the introduction of the franchise's perennial question about the extent to which the Doctor is allowed to change history. One of the first ever stories, The Aztecs, wrestled with this issue, albeit at a more sedate pace, and it's kept returning ever since, through the Charley Pollard arc in the Big Finish audios and reaching its more recent apogee in Father's Day in which we saw the grotesque results of history being deliberately changed.

My impression has always been that the Doctor can change only the history that he's aware of. In other words, since he knows the outcome of Hitler's rise to power he can't meet the young artist he was before and try and convince him to follow that career path instead of entering politics (for a version of what that might look like though, look no further than the John Cusack's failed attempt in the film Max). On the other hand he could quiet happily start a revolution against the Company in The Sunmakers because he didn't have a bloody clue what was happening on Pluto in our far future. Having already rationalised that for myself, as you can imagined it rendered that rather long political discussion in Lawrence Miles's Eighth Doctor novel Interference, in which the Doctor's harangued for choosing his revolutions a bit of a slog.

for a version of what that might look like though, look no further than the John Cusack's failed attempt in the film Max

Thankfully, the episode didn't contradict what I thought; the Doctor did give that glorious speech about having an awareness of what's flexible and isn't in time but as we saw, his awareness of events is still mutable. He didn't know that he would, as in the nostalgically referenced The Romans (dvd release for that shortly then) and The Visitation, become part of the established events, or importantly the motivation behind them, inadvertent in those cases, premeditatedly (to an extent) here. It confirmed my other theory that for all the timey-wimey stuff we Ahistorians look to in order to rationalise multiple versions of Human Nature and how the audio The Fires of Vulcan can still be part of the Whoniverse, in terms of how historical events are played out, the timelords are already a part of history (in much the same way as The Master was already in London for Smith & Jones and Scaroth in Paris for City of Death). We're just watching/reading/hearing how that became so. Which is why perhaps he could allow Caecilius's family to survive; he was meant to, and Donna made him understand that. Plus, who else was going to live to invent the 'volcano' word?

To make this the thematic core of the episode, the emotional stick with which to smack Tennant and Tate over the head, and then throw it out on a Saturday night after John Barrowman's odd-ball new gameshow, was really, really brave. Within that too, to drop in all of that talk of soothsayers, nature of cults (that c-u-l-t-s) and the passing into of your offspring thereof was just so very impressive. True, the series has annexed this territory before in The Pirate Planet of all things and the implications of joining a sisterhood were discussed by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, but then it was one of Douglas Adams' sideshow ideas, here it was at the very centre of the story and expecting the audience to think. Just as the series was getting a reputation for being an empty sparkly run-around (something I didn't countenance myself), once again it was producing a piece of apposite superior excitement.

the implications of joining a sisterhood were discussed by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure

Not even a pre-show, droning Ofcom telling off could bring down this bird. And hanging in its claws were Dave and Catherine (Cathy?), the former offering his usual note perfect performance and the latter demonstrating that you know, you people who thought that casting in her in the series and bringing back the runaway bride was a mistake, you're all fools, the lot of you. These characters are great double act, equals in so many ways, Donna doing everything a companion should do and just a little bit more. (Many great lines: "You just defended us using a water pistol? I bloody love you!" So say we all). Granted Rose defied those clockwork men, but largely through threatening them with the Doctor's wrath. Here it was Donna's own strength that was the menace and you have to imagine that even if the Doctor hadn't happened along, she still would have found a way to avoid the sharp end of the blade. That scene was hilarious.

But also in series drama you don't write and then hand a scene like the one in the TARDIS in which Donna pleads with the Doctor to save someone, anyone to an actress unless you're completely sure that she can carry it off. You protect them. At least you do these days. How often has a companion become derided simply because the actor didn't have the experience to deal with the material. Yet, here Tate was sobbing, giving the very human reaction we all would have to the horrific events that were unfolding looking at the one man who could change the outcome not doing anything. Tate proved that Andy, Russell and Julie all knew what they were doing in casting her, and simply you should have had more faith. You fools, again I say, you fools. Not naming any names.

You fools, again I say, you fools.

A The Fires of Pompeii should be a fairly standard stand alone episode but like Tooth & Claw which introduced (god help us) Torchwood, through the words of the soothsayers, the potential arc threads of the fourth season were thrown wide open. What has Donna on her back? "She is coming back" is potentially a reference to Rose (although I wouldn't be surprised if there's a double meaning)? What is the Doctor's real name? Could it be The Other one? What is The Medusa Cascade? What's with all the rifts in space and time (another once cropped up here when Pompeii went bye-bye)? And just to make you really shudder have you noticed how the Doctor's suddenly mentioning the Shadow Proclamation again and how like planets are disappearing like the Nestenes both things we haven't come across since that very first episode.

Also, what if the image of record time held in Gallifreyan Matrix, clearly taking a break in some pocket universe somewhere, shows that the Cambridge family reference should have died and that in saving them the Doctor's stretching the web of time? Like the random dropping of the sonic-pen in the bin in the opening episode, all of these little changes to the timeline, when he lets his humanised nature get the better of him are finally going to catch up with him, as with the aforementioned Charley-arc, a range of subtle changes in the timeline, creating enough breaks for something horrific to break through. When that episode didn't end with the TARDIS back in the vortex, but six month's later as the family were making waves in their new adopted society, I thought like poor old Lucy in the audio Seasons of Fear, that horror would appear and eat them up. Instead, we were presented with something that could simply be a commemoration of the power that saved them, or a ripple which could have similarly grave implications as the seasons develops. See this post at The Doctor Who Forum for a range of other crackpot interesting theories, some more likely than others ("the Doctor walks with stardust in his wake... Astrid must be coming back and she's a TARDIS..." etc).